1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to voice quality monitoring and reporting. More particularly, the present invention relates to detecting poor voice quality indicator at a gateway, and capturing and reporting voice data for analysis.
2. Background Art
Subscribers use speech quality as the benchmark for assessing the overall quality of a telephone network. An effective troubleshooting procedure is a key to maintaining and improving perceived voice quality.
Almost every telephone user has experienced calls with undesirable amounts of static, echo, intermittent interruptions, and the like. In such events, telephone users take one of several actions. If such problems occur less frequently, telephone users may learn to ignore such problems when they do occur, by simply disconnecting the problematic call and initiating a new call. If such problems occur more frequently, telephone users may switch to different telephone carriers in the hopes of experiencing a superior voice quality with a new carrier. In addition, some telephone users may report such problems to their carrier.
However, even if such problems are reported to the carriers, today, the carriers have no ability to capture and analyze the voice data to determine the source of the reported problems in real-time to provide a remedy. In the event that such problems are reported frequently, the carriers dispatch field engineers to the central office in order to capture the voice data for analysis. This type of troubleshooting, however, is quite expensive and time consuming, because it may take several days before such problems reoccur and the voice data are simultaneously and properly captured at the time such problems reoccur.
FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional telephone network, where telephone 105 is in communication with gateway VoIP device 110 at the edge of the network in the central office. Gateway VoIP device 110 includes CODECs (Coders and Decoders) for digitizing and speech encoding/decoding of the digitized data for transmission over IP network 115 for communication with telephone 120. In order to detect voice quality problems, field engineers are typically dispatched to the central office to obtain voice or speech data from gateway VoIP device 110 for simulation and analysis. Once in the central office, the field engineers must set up their test equipment, make wire connections to gateway VoIP device 110, configure gateway VoIP device 110 in diagnostics mode, and hope for the problems to reoccur sooner than later.
Since field engineers do not possess all the necessary equipment for simulation and analysis of the voiced data, such data must be transmitted to the engineering support centers for simulation and analysis. Once such data are simulated and analyzed, the engineering support centers may require additional data to be captured by the field engineers in order to pinpoint the source of such problems. Therefore, it may take several weeks or months to determine the source of a problem and provide a remedy for problems that occur frequently in the network. Even more, the time and expense associated with discovering voice quality problems may not allow troubleshooting for less frequent voice quality problems.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for real-time reporting of voice quality problems, and monitoring, capturing and reporting of voice data for simulation and analysis to discover the source of the problems and provide a remedy.